Viewers left high and dry after outsiders derail subway series

I had been prepping for this October for quite some time now, but so much for the best-laid plans of mice and men. Even if you are not a baseball fan, perhaps you have heard of the New York Yankees, the most famous team in American sport. They have a payroll which exceeded US$200 million this year and allowed them to assemble a line-up which many pundits were claiming was the most formidable collection of hitters in the storied history of baseball.

The Yankees tied for the most wins in the major leagues - 97 - with their National League neighbours, the New York Mets. This year's World Series looked very much like a repeat of their 2000 'subway series'.

Again, I was prepared for all this. I had my sick bag in hand knowing that if I wanted to watch October baseball, one of sport's most appetising dishes, then I would have to labour through the self-indulgent centre-of-the-universe myopia that characterises New York. But instead of being repelled, I found myself openly rooting for a New York series for the first time in my life.

The Yankees are not a likeable team. They are a greedy colossus who wave mega-dollars at star players and usually end up acquiring these sporting mercenaries. Nothing has changed in that respect. But what was intriguing about the 2006 version of the Yankees was that their best starting pitcher, the man shouldering their post-season hopes, was Taiwan's Wang Chien-ming.

Wang had an incredible season with the Yankees, winning 19 games and losing six, and in the process becoming Taiwan's most famous sports personality. The idea of Wang pitching the Yankees to World Series glory would have set off a memorable frenzy in Taiwan. The island's notoriously pugilistic politicians would have been punching each other in the head during parliamentary debates to prove who was a bigger Wang fan. The entertainment factor would have been off the scale.

More importantly, though, the presence of Wang in the famed Yankee pinstripes would put baseball where it belongs in Asia - front-row centre.

Of course to have a Subway series, the Mets would have had to make it too, and while I have no particular affinity for nor dislike of the Mets, the rest of the National League teams in the post-season were so bad that they would have been painful to watch and done a complete disservice to the sanctity of October baseball. The Yankees and Mets would meet in the World Series and all over this town American bankers and lawyers would be sneaking into work a few hours late after spending their morning watching the fall classic from the Big Apple. It was a fait accompli.